Gossipy and judgmental thumbnail sketches of First Ladiesnot every one, but enough of them to wear the topic out entirely. Presidential daughter, biographer, and novelist Truman (Murder on the Potomac, 1994, etc.) is unabashedly opinionated about this famous job, which, one senses from this book, ought to be: Protect your man from the big, bad world; comfort him when you cannot; and don't cost him any votes. The women themselves come second. As Truman says, ``While I am heartily in favor of women achieving maximum opportunities and power, I doubt that the First Lady is the ideal symbolic vehicle for this ascent.'' Not surprisingly, Nancy Reagan, who exemplifies the sort of loving ``protector'' Truman admires, comes in for gentler handling than does Eleanor Roosevelt, whose accomplishments, we are told, are to be weighed against her ``tragic limitations'' as a wife. Although Truman can be effusive in her praise (she calls Lady Bird Johnson the ``almost perfect First Lady''), she's not one to miss a good opportunity for sniping at her subjects, as when she serves up examples of Jacqueline Kennedy's ``visceral repugnance for average Americans.'' One might almost take Truman for anti- elitist, did she not also say of Dolley Madison, the daughter of an unsuccessful businessman and a boardinghouse keeper, that ``there is nothing in her past to account for her combination of good taste and impeccable hospitality.'' Still, inclined to find something good in each of these women, Truman might have been stumped to find a real loser had not her father, Harry S Truman, judged Warren Harding the worst president. And so Florence Harding turns out to be a ``mean-spirited'' woman with a ``dÇclassÇ style, whining voice, and overbearing manner.'' Well-known lives revisited from a perspective that is more convincingly insider than insightful. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43439-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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